IBM's Sequoia: 20x faster than the world's fastest supercomputer

Moderator emeritus

Roadrunner? Pfff, your chart-topping 1.105 petaflops are laughable. IBM just announced its 20-freaking-petaflop Sequoia supercomputer due for delivery by 2012. While supercomputer speeds have steadily increased year-over-year, a 20x jump in calculations per second since the last world ranking is unheard of, even if the system has yet to come on-line. Slated to spend its life simulating nuclear explosions, Sequoia will use 45-nm (PowerPC, presumably) processors with 16 cores per chip for as many as 4,096 processors per rack. That's a total of 1.6 million cores assisted by 1.6 petabytes of memory. Perhaps all this processing power might help IBM understand the futility of its Lotus Notes strategy.

thread starterModerator emeritus

Does it matter what it's for? There's someone there with the money to buy these things, and it pushes innovation, which in the end benefits us all as the tech filters down to our desktops over the years.

Anyway, I'd rather anyone be simulating nuclear anything than having a crack at live experiments.

macrumors 6502a

"Faster" means nothing. There are qualities of a chip other than speed. Perhaps PowerPC is better for supercomputers, but that hardly reflects on the Intel/PowerPC debate for personal computers at all. Are you waiting for the mythical Sequoia PowerBook?

macrumors 6502

"Faster" means nothing. There are qualities of a chip other than speed. Perhaps PowerPC is better for supercomputers, but that hardly reflects on the Intel/PowerPC debate for personal computers at all.

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this new super computer will probably use the POWER 7 chip from IBM, it supports the PowerPC instruction set however it is not a PowerPC.

macrumors 68000

this new super computer will probably use the POWER 7 chip from IBM, it supports the PowerPC instruction set however it is not a PowerPC.

The Intel/PowerPC debate for PC's is over, Intel won

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Right. Choosing to use an Intel (x86) vs PowerPC instruction set for a large scale super computer with a (presumably?) specified task, is no indication that a PPC chip is better suited for the consumer market, with all the many variables that the consumer personal computer market demands.

It's like saying that for small devices, the ARM processes is "better", and so obviously it should be used in both consumer desktops as well as super computers!

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